Historians Figure Out How Ancient Sailors Navigated Mediterranean By Building One of Their Ships

With oil prices once again skyrocketing, some utopians have dusted off the old dream of replacing big, gas-guzzling container ships with the tall sailing ships of the past. However, the biggest sailing ship ever, the American clipper Great Republic, could carry just 5,000 tons of cargo - about 10% what a container ship can tote.

What better way to figure out a mystery of the ancients than to try it out yourself? That’s what one sailing aficionado from Israel did when confronted with a puzzle from the Christian Bible.

David Gal, a doctoral student in the Department of Maritime Civilizations at the University of Haifa, says he has figured out why the Christian Apostle Paul sailed from Judea to Rome along the southern coast of Anatolia in 60 CE - a route that, to him, wasn’t the most obvious one, since most winds in the Mediterranean are westerlies and Paul was going west.

That year, Paul was sent to the imperial capital to answer to Jewish authorities for preaching the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who claimed to have been the Jewish messiah. Most Jews did not accept Jesus’ teachings, and he was tried and executed by crucifixion for blasphemy and subversion in either 30 or 33 CE.

Paul’s journey is recounted in unusual detail in the New Testament book of Acts. The preacher zigzagged his way across the sea, swinging north of Cyprus before heading to the city of Myra (modern Demre) in southern Anatolia. From there, he went west past Rhodes, to Knidos, then south to the southern coast of Crete and west across the southernmost parts of the Ionian Sea. However, he was shipwrecked in Malta and his journey took much longer than anticipated.

“Until recently, we didn’t understand why the Alexandrian grain ship that Paul joined in southern Anatolia, bound for Rome, chose that particular route,” Gal told Haaretz.

The boat, Ma’agan Mikhael II, is a replica of a ship found in 1985 about 2 meters underneath the seabed off the coast of Kibbutz Ma’agan Mikhael in northern Israel, not far from Caesarea. In ancient times, the city was known as Caesarea Maritima or Caesarea Palestine, named after the Roman emperor Augustus Caesar. The replica boat was finished in 2016 and is just one of two ships in the world that simulates a merchant sailing vessel from Before the Common Era (BCE).

By coincidence, Caesarea also happens to be the port from which Paul left on his trip to Rome.

In part, Gal’s study was based on computer modeling, which combined vast amounts of weather data and conducted 5,479 virtual sailing trips along 224 different possible routes from Caesarea to Rome, for a total of 1.2 million virtual sailing trips. However, that wasn’t enough: Gal also took a crew of 10 volunteer sailors out in the Ma’agan Mikhael II to explore the intangible human element of the journey. With just one sail, the ship moves along at a brisk 3.9 miles per hour.

“Only when we sailed on Ma’agan Mikhael II did we understand the real limitations of the ship and the sailors,” Gal told Haaretz. “We found that in many sections of the coast, the breeze doesn’t support this type of movement.”

“They didn’t sail counter to the prevailing wind, but waited for days with a favorable wind in the opposite direction,” Gal concluded. “We found there were such days in a large meteorological sampling. Until now, scholars didn’t examine that but used low-resolution meteorological averages that erase the variance in the wind.”

Gal said he has taken the ship out more than 80 times, sailing as far as Cyprus, and found that the daily wind patterns, in which breezes can blow westward from the Levantine coast, have remained strong after 3,000 years. By navigating those patterns, ancient sailors could have crept up the coast until they found more favorable winds.

“We have data about its performance in all wind conditions and how various currents affect it, and that enables us to conduct a reliable simulation of sailing. With its help, we acquired insights into the way such a ship is operated; we had a better understanding of how four people can sail from Greece to here and back,” he said.